Profanity: Obscenity, Perversion, and Kitsch. Vernacular Efforts to Represent the Holocaust in Poland and the Question of Holocaust Decorum

In Hungary, the development of the concept of folk art was accompanied by the definitions of cottage industry, artistic cottage industry, and later applied folk art. From the late 19th century until the 1990s, the process was closely related to the development of cottage industry movements.The development of the cottage industry relied on several pillars: in the beginning, besides the upward convergence of economically underdeveloped regions, the construction of a national identity also played an important role, but in the post-World War II political system, economic and commercial considerations came to the fore. Encouraging designers and makers of artifacts to create objects of artistic quality while preserving authenticity, and thereby training conscious creative individuals, remained an important aspect all along. The institutional system of applied folk arts born in the 1950s has made a lasting contribution to the ethnographic collection of the cooperatives established at that time, as well as in the development of new design directions created during production. The domestic and foreign trade of folk art objects reached its highest circulation ever at that time, which not only ensured a livelihood for the tens of thousands of employees and outworkers of the cooperatives but also created the “economic conditions for the preservation of tradition.” Yet in the ongoing discourses on the revival – “heritagization” – of traditional handicrafts and folk art, trade is kind of a taboo, which must also take into consideration market interests that are often difficult to reconcile with the safeguarding of authenticity and genuineness. In this article, I look at the Hungarian institutions of folk art trade from the Second World War to the present day, and share the experiences of those involved in trade, based on written sources and interviews.

This article considers the representations of Holocaust in Poland by discussing the ways in which photographs of Jewish children are used in literature, film and public commemoration. It shows how a “postmemorial reading” of these images by, predominantly gentile, writers, directors and social actors might be viewed as an attempt to rhetorically fill the void left after the destruction of Poland's Jewish community and to project an image of a tolerant civic society. The article examines famous images, like the photo of the Warsaw Ghetto boy, with which this discussion begins, and lesser known pictures, such as the family photographs of Henio Żytomirski from Lublin, which are examined towards the end of this article. While looking at these images, I reflect on the interaction between the visual representations of Jewish children, the memory of the Shoah in Poland and the fashioning of Polish national identity in the wake of the accession to European Union.

Each scholar working in the field of Holocaust literature and representation has a story to tell. Not only the scholarly story of the work they do, but their personal story, their journey to becoming a specialist in Holocaust studies. What academic, political, cultural, and personal experiences led them to choose Holocaust representation as their subject of research and teaching? What challenges did they face on their journey? What approaches, genres, media, or other forms of Holocaust representation did they choose and why? How and where did they find a scholarly “home” in which to share their work productively? Have political, social, and cultural conditions today affected how they think about their work on Holocaust representation? How do they imagine their work moving forward, including new challenges, responses, and audiences? These are but a few of the questions that the authors in this volume address, showing that a scholar's field of

In many European countries, disparities have grown between history and the memory of the Holocaust. Debates on Polish–Jewish relations during the Holocaust and empirical studies in the field of education reveal that there is a gap between research and education. The emphasis in this paper is on the content of new history textbooks published after the 2008 educational reforms in Poland.

O texto apresenta a exposição O Fio Invisível. O Popular e o Divino no Imaginário de Sofia de Medeiros, patente no Museu de Arte Popular de Lisboa entre 7 de março e 30 de junho de 2019. O percurso artístico que Sofia de Medeiros tem vindo a desenvolver desde os anos 1990 conjuga uma forte componente de investigação etnográfica, da qual revela ser profunda conhecedora, e uma experiência vivida deste património de tradições culturais em diálogo com a sua prática artística que lhes dá forma. Inspirada no saber fazer e habilidades manuais oriundas do artesanato, o trabalho da artista açoriana torna inseparáveis o pensamento e a reflexão teórica das manualidades e habilidades técnicas. A artista procura tecer relações entre a arte contemporânea e a arte popular. Apresentando alguns trabalhos realizados entre 2012 e 2017 e um novo e maior conjunto de obras inéditas expressamente concebidas para três salas do Museu de Arte Popular (Sala do Minho, Sala de Trás-os-Montes e Sala dos Pórticos), a exposição propõe criar um diálogo com alguns documentos históricos, como fotografias, desenhos e objetos que pertencem às coleções tanto deste museu como também do Museu Nacional de Etnologia.

The post-Hegelian turn in critical philosophy “after Auschwitz” left residues in contemporary cultural criticism that have also influenced the development o f Holocaust and trauma studies in recent years. In Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject, Paul Eisenstein explores how the Hegelian subject might be redeemed for Holocaust and trauma studies from a milieu that has sometimes led to its preemptive burial. The ultimate aim o f this redemption is to make a case for recovering the dialectic between the Particular and the Universal in Hegel’s conceptualization o f the subject o f history for the project o f bearing witness to the traumatic past. Eisenstein’s vehicles for this agenda include Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, Thomas M ann’s Doctor Faustus, and David Grossman’s See Under: Love. His analyses o f these works deliver insight after insight, all o f which challenge prevailing assumptions about the limits o f witnessing when all perspectives are partial yet nevertheless should— or indeed must—retain universal implications. Eisenstein remarks the myriad reasons for a political if not funda­ mentally anti-intellectual suspicion o f Hegel in “Holocaust Memory and Hegel,” the first chapter of Traumatic Encounters. In his discussion of Hegel and his critics, Eisenstein righdy observes that Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute Spirit have come to be associated with the aggrandizing and difference-obliterating tendencies o f National Socialism. This asso­ ciation follows from reductive interpretations o f Theodor W. Adorno’s excoriating evaluation of the fate o f metaphysics and lyric poetry after Auschwitz and Jacques Derrida’s subsequent deconstruction o f the on-

 Reviews Goethe specialists, but to all of us who are inclined to hope that literature might make things better. M E C, C C L Witness between Languages: e Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context. By P D. (Dialogue and Disjunction: Studies in Jewish German Literature , Culture, and ought) Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. Tantalizingly written and dely argued, this monograph by Peter Davies offers a fresh perspective on the study of testimonies of the Holocaust through the lens of translation. In the Introduction, Davies argues that ‘without translation there would be no Holocaust’ (p. , author’s emphasis), by which he means that the proliferation of knowledge about the Holocaust, as we understand it today, influenced to great extent by eyewitness accounts, would be unthinkable without the oen occluded or de-emphasized work done by translators. Davies’s argument works from a central tenet, namely that the work of translation entails a highly dialogic practice. Translations, and the translators that make them possible, form an important part of the larger transnational, multilingual conversation connected to source texts. To put it another way, translators are active participants, key players in the discrete intertextual networks that arise out of the translation of source texts into other languages. Indeed, this study’s principal strength lies in its tightly interwoven combination of close textual analysis with the insightful exploration of how social and political expectations regarding Holocaust representation within specific historical contexts have affected the translation of Holocaust testimonies. is study takes care to document how authors and translators interact with varying practices of Holocaust memory at particular historical moments and in particular geographic areas. As one might expect from a study of this scope, Davies explores a wide variety of Holocaust testimonies, including texts originally penned in Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish. In Chapter , ‘Translation and the Witness Text’, Davies situates his study as a ‘mediati[on] between Holocaust studies and translation studies’, which ‘will discuss methods that offer points of contact between descriptions of translations and the philosophical, literary, ethical, and political concerns of Holocaust scholars, and that take into account the agency of the translator and the expectations placed on a Holocaust testimony in particular cultural and historical circumstances’ (p. ). Chapter , ‘Making Translation Visible’, explores how translators treat the question of voice, specifically translating the ‘voice’ of a Holocaust survivor and eyewitness from one linguistic and cultural context to another. Using the theoretical framework established in the first two chapters as a point of departure, the third chapter reconsiders the complex, to some extent controversial, translation history surrounding Elie Wiesel’s Night () by analysing the German and two separate English translations that orbit to varying degrees around the iconic  French La Nuit, which MLR, .,   has until more recently overshadowed its textual predecessor, the  . . . un di velt hot geshvign. In Chapter  Davies switches gears from Holocaust memory in the West, exploring the question of Soviet memory in Vasily Grossman’s ‘e Hell of Treblinka’ () and Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babii Yar (). Using these two accounts as his primary examples, Davies investigates the effects the Cold War had on the translation and dissemination of Holocaust texts from East to West. Krstyna Żywulska’s Auschwitz testimony and the question of self-translation form the focal point of Chapter . Davies traces Żywulska’s conscious articulation of herself as a Polish anti-Fascist resistance fighter in her  autobiographical account Przeżyłam Oświęcim (I Survived Auschwitz), and her attempt to maintain this identity in the German translation (Wo vorher Birken waren: Überlebensbericht einer jungen Frau aus Auschwitz-Birkenau), which she prepared and published in  aer resettling in West Germany. Davies demonstrates how Żywulska’s selftranslation , both as the literal act of translating her own text from one language to another (i.e. Polish to German) and as the metaphorical cultivation of a particular narrating persona, had to contend with ‘quite incompatible “victim cultures”’, at one end of the spectrum, ‘a postwar Polish Stalinist culture that stressed the martyrdom of the nation as a whole’, and at the other end ‘a West German society that [. . .] was in the process of renegotiating its...

Crime writing is not often associated with Holocaust representations, yet an emergent trend, especially in German literature, combines a general, popular interest in crime and detective fiction with historical writing about the Holocaust, or critically engages with the events of the Shoah. Particularly worthy of critical investigation are Bernhard Schlink’s series of detective novels focusing on private investigator Gerhard Selb, a man with a Nazi background now investigating other people’s Nazi pasts, and Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case (2011) which engages with the often inadequate response of the post-war justice system in Germany to Nazi crimes. In these novels, the detective turns historian in order to solve historic cases. Importantly, readers also follow in the detectives’ footsteps, piecing together a slowly emerging historical jigsaw in ways that compel them to question historical knowledge, history writing, processes of institutionalised commemoration and memory formation, all of which are key issues in Holocaust Studies. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, I will argue that the significance of this kind of fiction has been insufficiently recognised by critics, perhaps in part because of its connotations as popular fiction. Secondly, I will contend that these texts can be fruitfully analysed by situating them in relation to recent debates about pious and impious Holocaust writing as discussed by Gillian Rose and Matthew Boswell. As a result, these texts act as exemplars of Rose’s contention that impious Holocaust literature succeeds by using new techniques in order to shatter the emotional detachment that has resulted from the use of clichés and familiar tropes in traditional pious accounts; and by placing detectives and readers in a position of moral ambivalence that complicates their understanding of the past on the one hand, and their own moral position on the other.

Animated documentaries dealing with the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, and their descendants constitute a new phenomenon and inaugurate a new field of Holocaust commemoration. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of animated Holocaust documentaries. It explores movies produced in the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe, and Israel. Based on theories developed in the fields of animated documentary, Holocaust studies, cinema studies, trauma studies, and memory studies, this volume discusses the ways in which animated Holocaust documentaries create a new layer of Holocaust microhistory, their advantages, and their disadvantages. It shows how these movies visualize subject matter that previously eluded live-action documentaries such as the unfilmed past and people’s inner worlds. The book shows that Holocaust animated documentaries also have specific shortcomings and have generated a new set of problems relating to Holocaust memory and representation. For example, the vast majority marginalize the horrors and instead focus on bravery, resilience, and hope.

Everyday people make use of Instagram to visually share their experiences encountering Holocaust memory. Whether individuals are sharing their photos from Auschwitz, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, this dissertation uncovers the impetus to capture and share these images by the thousands. Using visuality as a framework for analyzing how the Holocaust has been seen, photographed, and communicated historically, this dissertation argues that these individual digital images function as objects of postmemory, contributing to and cultivating an accessible visual and digital archive. Sharing these images on Instagram results in a visual, grassroots archival space where networked Holocaust visuality and memory can flourish. The Holocaust looms large in public memory. Drawing from Holocaust studies, public history, photography theory, and new media studies, this dissertation argues that the amateur Instagram image is far from static. Existing spaces of Holocaust memory create preconditions for everyday publics to share their encounters with the Holocaust on their own terms. Thus, the final networked Instagram image is the product of a series of author interventions, carefully wrought from competing narratives and Holocaust representations. The choice to photograph, edit, post, and hashtag one's photo forges a public method for collaborating with hegemonic memory institutions. This work brings together seemingly disparate sources to find commonality between Instagram images, museum guestbook entries, online reviews, former concentration camps, and major Holocaust memorials and museums. This research, one of the first studies of Holocaust visual culture on Instagram, underscores the fluidity of Holocaust memory in the twenty-first century. While amateur photography at solemn sites has sparked concern, this dissertation demonstrates that though the number of Holocaust survivors become fewer in number, the act of remembering the genocide can be coded into the everyday behaviour of the amateur photographers featured in this work. This work not only shares authority with everyday publics in their efforts to remember and memorialize the Holocaust but reminds us that seemingly small and individual acts of remembrance can coalesce, contributing to a fluid and accessible archive of visual memory.

Mõtestades materiaalset kultuuri / Making sense of the material culture

Nostalgia, we are told, is in the business of idealizing the past. Because nostalgia is routinely associated with the falsification and distortion of memory, any discussion about its role in Holocaust representation is fraught with ethical concerns. What purpose can nostalgic sentimentality serve in evoking the reality of the genocide? This essay argues that nostalgia's power to falsify, distort, and sentimentalize the past can be productively and self-consciously mobilized to explore the mechanisms of both remembrance and suppression of memory. As I demonstrate through the readings of Danilo Kiš's Family Circus and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood, because nostalgia raises questions about the possibility of recovering the past, about the dynamics of projection and recuperation, and about the continuity of the self, fictional texts stage nostalgic homecomings precisely in order to confront the realities of both Jewish persecution and Nazification. Nostalgia, in other words, serves not only as mechanism for working through traumatic memories, but as a catalyst for a critical examination of the past.

Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections, by Jonathan Druker. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 173 pp. $74.95.Jonathan Druker's ambitious and challenging book critiques philosophical roots in humanistic Enlightenment thought characterize Primo corpus of writings on Holocaust. Addressing a lacuna in literary and Holocaust studies, Druker reassesses humanism from a critical point of view and exposes problematic assumptions organize representation and experience of Holocaust. In order carry out this task, Druker juxtaposes writing with of four'posthumanist theorists - namely, Theodore Adorno, Emanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Michel Foucault. For Druker these theorists serve as useful counterpoints work insofar as they assert, each in its own way, that fascism was not only a bitter enemy but also a logical result of Enlightenment; social and political structures of domination serving totalitarian regimes are implicit in Enlightenment thought; and principle of universality [which Levi held so dear], while purporting emancipate individual, crushes cultural and ethnic difference of every kind while revitalizing forms of intolerance like antisemitism (p. 2).The book is organized thematically, with each of seven chapters devoted a different concept: man, culture, language, ethics, history, science, and labor. For most part, chapters present a different combination of Holocaust writings together with writings of one or more of theorists mentioned above. Chapter One focuses on ways in which Levi, in Survival in Auschwitz, privileges humanist concept of Universal Man over an identity based upon difference. unflagging faith in validity of universal human subject leads Druker see a type of secular theodicy in text, or an attempt integrate particular instances of suffering into a narrative of historical progress directed toward good (p. 29). Although experience in Auschwitz precipitates a crisis of belief in validity of this theodicy - similar end of theodicy as outlined in Levinas and Adorno - for Druker it remains a troublingly predominant conceit of text. Chapter Two focuses on figuration of Ulysses in Survival in Auschwitz as a problematic symbol of temporary redemption from world of lager and as a vessel for humane [cultural] values promise Levi a means resist camp's inhumanity (p. 36). Reading figuration of Ulysses against Horkheimer and Adornos discussion of Homer's Odysseus, Druker complicates traditional understanding of Ulysses fails question links between high culture and violence.Chapter Three uses Lyotard's concept of differend to explore unexpected intersection . . . between Primo humanism and Hegelian modes of discourse like those of Nazism and Italian Fascism (p. 55). Druker focuses here in particular on what he calls imperial 'we' in Survival in Auschwitz, is use of first person plural speak from a distant, analytical, and primarily scientific point of view. Druker stresses his intention is not crudely say Levi's 'we simply recapitulates a Nazi perspective; rather . . . Levi and Nazis and all of Europe share models of Enlightenment thought lead not only common ways of understanding history but also radical programs seek remake societies by destroying them (p. 68).In Chapter Four Druker uses Levinas's writings on ethical engagement with other in order draw out, in Survival in Auschwitz, the muted presence of an anti-Enlightenment counternarrative which puts into question validity of humanist ethics. This counternarrative, as Druker sees it, is in constant tension with opposite impulse validates humanist ethical project found throughout writing. …

The three aspects of contemporary Holocaust studies with which this section of the conference is concerned — memory, representation, and education — may well strike the uninitiated as a strange set of bedfellows. In introducing here these three clusters of ideas and institutional practices I should start by pointing out that the relationship between them is highly complex and raises many questions, both at the level of practice as well as issues of a more theoretical nature. The Holocaust as seen from these perspectives no longer belongs to the exclusive domain of history and the historians but rather to some other areas of expertise which are not always very easy to pin down. From a scholarly point of view, some might say that this merely reflects the uneasy interdisciplinary nature of the field of Holocaust studies, which in recent years have developed a very large range of academic approaches and, thereby, some intrinsic internal contradictions or inconsistencies between different types of scholarly method, modes of analysis, and rules of evidence. Whilst I believe it is indeed necessary to be aware of such criticism, the truth is that the involvement of this increasingly wide range of practitioners and scholars in Holocaust research and activities beyond the purely historical has become an established fact. Perhaps it is on account of my own background as a social anthropologist that I prefer to see this diversity as in fact highly productive: for it has unquestionably generated new thoughts and new undertakings, bridging the bitterness of the past with an optimism for the future. Memory, one might say, concerns itself with the past, education with the future, and representation with the mode of transmission between the two.

The article analyzed toponyms used by boykos in songs. Any proper names used in folk art are the object of study of folklore onomastics. Today, this science is in the field of view of many researchers who characterize both folk prose and folk songs from the point of view of proper names. On the basis of the source "Boyko Folk Songs" (vols. 1–2), 322 folklore toponyms were analyzed. The toponymic composition of the songs of the Boyko region was taken into account because of the autochthonous nature of the region and the preservation of many linguistic and cultural features of our people. The main points raised in this article were a wide representation of various types of toponyms preserved in the folklore of the Boikos, the reproduction of the verbal environment of the onym and the clarification of typical compatibility, as well as the clarification of the frequency of the use of such names and their functions in the folk text. As a result, it was found that oikonyms (148), choronyms (110), microtoponyms (38) and oronyms (26) function the most in songs. Onyms in the folk art of the Boykos correlate primarily with the plot, thematic and genre specifics of the texts. Toponyms are often combined with adjectives, pronouns and are also accompanied by prepositions, which emphasize and enhance the locativeness of the folk song space. The most frequent in the texts are the oikonym Lviv, the choronym Ukraine, the microtoponym Magura and the oronym Makivka. These toponyms vividly identify the national and symbolic expanse. Fixed proper names mainly perform identification, locative, emotional and symbolic functions. Therefore, in the course of the analysis, the view that folklore toponyms are the national and cultural map of Ukraine, our value, engraved in words, was confirmed. Such names contain information about the history of the region, about the landscape, social and cultural diversity of the Boykivshchyna.